Richard Gregory


Richard Langton Gregory was a British psychologist and Professor of Neuropsychology at the University of Bristol.

Life and career

Richard Gregory was born in London, the son of Christopher Clive Langton Gregory and his first wife Helen Patricia. His father was an astronomer and the first Director of the University of London Observatory.
Gregory served with the Royal Air Force's Signals branch during World War II, and after the war earned an RAF scholarship to Downing College, Cambridge. One of Sir Frederic Bartlett's last pupils at Cambridge, Gregory admitted to having been inspired by him. He was made an Honorary Fellow of Downing in 1999.
In 1967, with Prof. Donald Michie and Prof. Christopher Longuet-Higgins, he founded the Department of Machine Intelligence and Perception, a forerunner of the Department of Artificial Intelligence, at the University of Edinburgh. He was Head of the Bionics Research Laboratory, Professor of Bionics, and Department Chairman 1968–70. Gregory was founding editor of the journal Perception, which emphasized phenomenology and novel percepts produced by new stimuli. He was a founding member of the Experimental Psychology Society and served as its President in 1981–2.
He collaborated with W. E. Hick for the latter's influential paper "On the rate of gain of information". He commented: "I was the only subject for his gain of information experiment to complete the course, as he was the only other subject and he packed it in when the apparatus fell apart."
In 1981, he founded The Exploratory, an applied science centre in Bristol, the first of its kind in the UK. In 1989, he was appointed Osher Visiting Fellow of the Exploratorium, a similar scientific education centre in San Francisco, California.
Gregory suggested Hermann von Helmholtz as his hero from past psychology, describing him as "the modern founder of the science of perception".
He appeared on, or was an advisor to, numerous science-related television programmes in the UK and worldwide. His particular interest was in optical illusions and what these revealed about human perception. He wrote and edited several books, notably Eye and Brain and Mind in Science. One of his hobbies was punning. In April 1993, he was the guest for BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, where his favourite choice was Beethoven's Piano Sonata No. 30.
Having suffered a stroke a few days earlier, he died on 17 May 2010 at the Bristol Royal Infirmary, surrounded by family and friends.

Lectures

In 1967, he delivered the Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on The Intelligent Eye.

Contribution

Gregory's main contribution to the discipline was in the development of cognitive psychology, in particular that of "Perception as hypotheses", an approach which had its origin in the work of Hermann von Helmholtz and his student Wilhelm Wundt. Between them, the two Germans laid the basis of investigating how the senses work, especially sight and hearing.
According to Gregory, Helmholtz should take the credit for realising that perception is not just a passive acceptance of stimuli, but an active process involving memory and other internal processes.
Gregory progressed this idea with a key analogy. The process whereby the brain puts together a coherent view of the outside world is analogous to the way in which the sciences build up their picture of the world, by a kind of hypothetico-deductive process. Although this takes place on a quite different time-scale, and inside one head instead of a community, nevertheless, according to Gregory, perception shares many traits with scientific method. A series of works by Gregory developed this idea in some detail.
Gregory's ideas ran counter to those of the American direct realist psychologist J. J. Gibson, whose 1950 The Perception of the Visual World was dominant when Gregory was a younger man. Much in Gregory's work can be seen as a reply to Gibson's ideas, and as the incorporation of explicitly Bayesian concepts into the understanding of how sensory evidence is combined with pre-existing beliefs. Gregory argued that optical illusions, such as the illusory contours in the Kanizsa triangle, demonstrated the Bayesian processing of perceptual information by the brain.

Works

Honorary degrees

YearHonorary degree
1990D. Univ.
D. Univ.
1993LL.D
1996D.Sc.
D.Sc.
1998D.Univ.
D.Sc.
1999D.Sc.
2000D.Sc.

Family

In 1953, he married Margaret Hope Pattison Muir, one son, one daughter. In 1967, he married Freja Mary Balchin, the daughter of writers Elizabeth and Nigel Balchin,. Gregory is survived by two children, two grandchildren and his long term companion Priscilla Heard.